This May 9th, eyeo announced that they would invest in AI start-up Factmata. Factmata will then take over further development of eyeo’s Trusted News browser extension, which had been relying on Factmata as a provider for filter data.

The Trusted News extension was first released in beta in late 2018, and the project was started by a small team of experts at eyeo who were driven to find a solution to the growing problem of fake news and hate speech online. Factmata is a developer of unique AI software, which can accurately score content for aspects like political bias, hate speech, racism, sexism, toxicity, obscenity, threats, insults, and clickbait. Using this, Trusted News can generate its “fake news” ratings. This helps users identify the level of trustworthiness of different articles and content online.

CEO & Co-Founder Till Faida noted, “Just as eyeo and Adblock Plus are protecting users from harmful, annoying ads, the partnership between Factmata and Trusted News gets us one step closer to a safer, more transparent internet. Content that is harmful gets flagged automatically, giving users more control over what kind of content they trust and want to read.”

So what’s next? Factmata’s strategy with Trusted News is to involve a community in the process of critically thinking about online content, as well as to assist its users in the process of judging articles. To start with, this might include an integration of Factmata’s API to detect if a page’s content might be sexist, racist, threatening, or politically propagandist. Users should be able to agree or disagree with judgements, as well as add their own reasoned opinions to the system. Community monitoring systems will be put in place to ensure no obvious gaming or abuse of the system, as well as tracking what Factmata deems as the “relevance” of the user in assessing the content.

Using Factmata’s novel “expert in the loop” approach to training machine learning algorithms, Trusted News and Factmata will be in a unique position to build a reliable, trust-able rating system for any piece of online content using an advanced, scalable AI, that becomes more representative of what the crowd thinks over time.

This is the next step in developing the Trusted News extension and fighting for a fairer and more sustainable web, as well as growing the partnership between eyeo and Factmata moving forward.

To get Trusted News, visit here. Platforms who want to moderate their content or protect their brands can visit Factmata.